Video Games Thread

[ancelotti]

It's a shame he didn't have that stare in Luigi's Mansion. None of those ghosts would have fucked with him!

[harv]

 

[harv]

Almost went for Luigi's Mansion 2 today but got Bravely Default instead. It's great so far, but I knew it would be good because I started to play the demo. The very start was quite a nice surprise, it comes with an AR card which you use at the beginning of the first cutscene, made the bird that gets kidnapped grabbed from my bedroom lol

I've only seen small stuff being done with AR cards before so it was pretty cool seeing a life size use for it, although the dozy tart kept on moving around a little too much when she was crapping herself about the hole opening up on my bedroom floor lol

Only cost me 12 quid because I traded in my Wii U retail copy of Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate after getting the digital version for free via the Mario Kart 8 free game promotion.

[harv]

Aw bollocks...decided to continue and finish my play through of Twilight Princess but when I did my Wii transfer ages ago it transferred some old saves from my Wii and overwrote my newer saves

Oh well, good job I love playing the game lol

[Late]

Bought Watch_Dogs yesterday (£25 second hand at Grainger).

I'm not very far into it so far but it seems decent. As the reviews indicate, it's not the ground-breaking title we'd been hoping for, and it's not as shiny as Ubi had initially led us to believe, but it all seems pretty good fun.
Haven't done much of the story yet. I did the first couple of missions then switched to just doing my own thing - so preventing a few crimes, unlocking a few ctOS towers, playing a few mini-games, and skimming a lot of folks' bank accounts, etc.

Some of the controls and objectives aren't all that intuitive, but I should get used to them soon enough.
Car handling isn't great, but remotely controlling barriers and traffic lights to stop pursuers is fun (though not always that effective - but that's probably just me needing to improve my timing and skills).

Was playing a bit of Texas Hold-em in a residential basement with a few NPCs last night. It's as you'd expect, but with it's own twist. There was a camera on the back wall, and I could remotely access it an occasionally see other players' cards - and I could also monitor heart rate etc. to see who's stressing out. Nice additions - though I mainly just played the game without resorting to those measures. Until a bug stopped me playing, anyway. My controller was working fine, but the game just stopped responding to my inputs to call/raise/fold. Hopefully that's an anomaly (possibly partly caused by my falling asleep for a couple of hours mid-game) and not indicative of the game having lots of bugs.

[harv]

Unfortunately any open world game is going to be full of bugs, they're a real nightmare to work on. Particularly when you find a crash. There are so many different variables involved that often you have absolutely no idea why it crashed which makes it impossible to reproduce. You're guaranteed to see a shitload of 'Once Only' crashes in the bug tracking database that were 'Closed As Not Seen' at the last minute before the game was sent for Submission to Microsoft and Sony for Standards and Functional testing.

And technically a game that forces you to quit the game and restart it is a Class A bug but Lead Testers like the easy life and usually have those as Class B bugs because it makes the bug statistics look better to QA Supervisors and Producers during meetings. Has always annoyed me, that. Any bug that forces you to restart a game should be a Class A, it's as bad as a crash.

[ancelotti]

Completed Guacamelee! Should be in bed really but had to defeat the final boss and I was too tired to read his attacks so it took me a few tries... Definitely wasn't the hardest fight though. I'd have to give that to the Javier Jaguar guy. Great fun.

[jman]

Calaca isn't that tough because he has a pattern of about 6/7 moves that are fairly easy to remember and he gives you plenty of time to get out of the way, whereas Javier, whilst he also has a pattern is much harder in dodging because his attacks are faster and not as easy to spot.. plus he will go between worlds just when you don't want him to, I beat Javier first time on normal, but he took me a good 30 minutes on hard I'd say.

Normal was fairly easy to complete, a few fights I had to re-do but not many.... the hardest fight for me though (on hard) was one inside the last area (leading up to Calaca) - some of those fights are pretty insane.

[harv]

Just started playing Assassin's Creed IV and really wish developers/researchers would do their jobs properly. It's supposed to be 1715 (or close to that year, can't specifically remember the year now). Have been looking at the character database and with the bit of crumpet it references the word 'cad' in her background. That word shouldn't be used, it wasn't used to describe people like that until well over a hundred years later. 'Ruffian' would have been a better word to use.

Bloody useless Frogs lol

[ancelotti]

Christ, sack the lot of them!

[harv]

Partly the writers/researchers to blame but the QA staff need to take some sort of responsibility too...although it wouldn't surprisemme if one of the testers bugged it and it got closed as 'By Design', also known in the trade as 'Can't fix, won't fix' lol

Just winds me up when things in video games aren't historically accurate

[Late]

There's also this thing where you jump back in time slightly if you die.
And everyone speaks English.
Incompetent game design if ever I saw it.

[harv]

Everyone speaking English fits in with the story, as does what happens when you die. But the use of the word 'cad' is incorrect, the word simply didn't exist. You could argue that the text in the database was written in the game's present time, but that wouldn't work either unless you can imagine that the use of the word gains popularity in the future like it did with the upper class in the 60s.

It should be 'ruffian', not 'cad'.

Just one of these things in games that really annoys me, bad research. We used to get instances of bad research all the time when I was working at Eidos. It wouldn't annoy me so much if these fuckers didn't earn more than twice as much as I used to lol

Bad game design is also a major bugbear of mine too. These days you need a design degree to get a design job but unfortunately the vast majority of people that get a design degree fail to get even the basics right. Years ago, when game design was a great deal better, all you needed were talent, imagination and, most importantly, extensive experience in actually playing games. To know what works and what doesn't. I've lost count of the amount of atrocious design bugs I've entered during my career, some of which were closed 'By Design' and mentioned in reviews as design issues lol. Bloody annoying, that's the sort of thing that made me want to email the designer in question with a link and a quote saying, 'I fucking told you so, you twat!!!'

You can't do that sort of thing though unfortunately...I got myself in a bit of bother years ago with sending the Producer of Champ Man an email saying that the Eidos logo splashscreen needed to be changed because it looked like it was designed by a 5 year old lmfao

Could be a coincidence but it was changed in the following game the next year I got a right bollocking for it though lol

[jman]

Jeez, is this what this thread has come too ? 

I'm holding off buying anything new for now... got a 2 week holiday in a few weeks and when I get back there will be plenty coming out :

NHL 15 in September
Destiny in September
Civilization 6 in October
Sunset Overdrive in October
Evolve in October
Far Cry 4 in November
Halo MC Collection in November

Its gonna be a busy winter 

[Late]

Destiny in September
Evolve in October
Far Cry 4 in November
Halo MC Collection in November

I'm definitely keen on those four (and Sunset Overdrive has my interest piqued, too) but realistically I'm probably going to have to limit myself to two of them at release and maybe get the others a few months later.
I'll also probably get Minecraft when it comes out on the One, in August. I've never played Minecraft before but I've played a rip-off version (Fortresscraft on the 360) and enjoyed it. And it's likely to be only £15-£20 rrp.